Alex Callinicos

Ellen Meiksins Wood, who died in January at the age of 73, was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of the past generation. She combined a rigorous commitment to theoretical clarity with a profound political passion. These qualities were very evident in the intervention that first brought her to broader attention, The Retreat from Class, first published in 1986.

There's been a revival of interest and debate in Marx's Capital. Why do you think this is and why did you want to intervene in these debates with your new book?

The main reason is because of the radicalisation and resistance to neoliberalism that we've seen since the 1990s. Initially there were critiques of neoliberalism and capitalism on very diverse intellectual bases.

I vividly remember first meeting Bernard Behrman, who died in August at the age of 81. It was in the mid-1970s. If you were interested in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, London was a fascinating place. It seemed to be full of exiles who had had to flee their country because of the ferocious repression that crushed the great struggles of the 1950s and early 1960s.

There has been a shift in the focus of anti-capitalist debate. A decade ago, in the immediate wake of Seattle, Genoa, and Florence, in a climate of popular revolt against capitalism and war, a major question was: party or movement? In other words, were various forms of localised organisation sufficient for what Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call the "multitude" of those oppressed by capital to break the power of the ruling class?

The demise of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and of the political tradition that it seeks to embody have been widely proclaimed on the British left in recent weeks. Thus the columnist Owen Jones has announced that "the era of the SWP and its kind is over." Is he right?

One of the landmark events in the rise of a new anti-capitalist movement ten years ago was the appearance of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's book Empire. A remarkable bestseller for a long book written in fairly esoteric philosophical language, Empire sought to situate resistance to neoliberalism within the framework of the Marxist critique of capitalism and imperialism.

Crises aren't made of whole cloth. They have multiple causes and are explosive precisely because they represent the coming together of the major contradictions in society.

Thus the political meltdown in Britain isn't just about a massive popular revulsion against what the media call the "political class". Its intensity arises from the way in which it has coincided with the global economic and financial crisis.

The world took a big step into even greater economic and geopolitical instability in the summer and early autumn of 2008. The credit crunch that started when the financial markets froze up in August 2007 shows every sign of becoming a global economic crisis. And the drive by the US to shore up its position as the hegemonic capitalist state has precipitated a potentially very dangerous confrontation with Moscow after the brief war between Russia and Georgia in August. Never has there been a greater need for a powerful anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left.

How could someone as charming, talented, and funny as Mark Steel have produced as sad and at points as unpleasant a book as this? The answer that Mark himself gives is that the past decade has been a bad one for him.